The present invention relates to the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard, and more particularly relates to a standard representation of DICOM in the unified modeling language (UML), i.e., a UML profile for DICOM.
The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard is a detailed specification that describes a means for formatting and exchanging images, and associated information. relies on standard communication protocols and addresses the communication and viewing of images from such modalities such as CT, MR, Ultrasound, Nuclear medicine, Digital Cardiology, Angiography, RF equipment and Radiation Therapy devices and systems. Extensions are being developed to include modalities with visible light sources such as Ophthalmology, Microscopy for Pathology applications, as well as Endoscopy. It also allows the exchange of patient demographic data, exam status and scheduling information. The rapid adoption of DICOM by the medical imaging industry is opening new opportunities for healthcare organizations to increase the quality and cost effectiveness of patient care.
DICOM has an information model defining a set of Information Object Definitions (IODs) which provide an abstract definition of real-world objects applicable to communication of digital medical information. For each IOD, DICOM specifies any necessary information for the semantic description of the IOD, relationships to associated real-world objects relevant to the IOD and attributes which describe the characteristics of the IOD. Each IOD, moreover, is defined as a set of tables based on the entity-relationship (E-R) scheme. The problem is that IODs are not machine-readable and not easy to capture and follow for non-DICOM literates. This acts as a barrier to communication between information architects and software developers from different domains.